Drinking
Past some threshold drunkenness becomes obvious on the body. The drinker has to always lean, their arms no longer make sense, but most of all it’s something in the eyes, in their naked, unfocused stare, in how the eyelids become mechanical. The drinker begins to resemble a doll, which is also, unfortunately, how the world begins to treat them. “Will you be nice to me?” hiccuped the Alsatian woman (a Le Pen supporter, it turned out) as she slumped on my shoulder, and I couldn’t help wondering—before taking her to her hotel, holding her hair while she threw up, and tucking her into bed—what cruel designer programmed this question into her voice apparatus.
The lesson I learned very early and luckily only once, while ineffectually helping my mother look through my father’s pockets, was that a wasted individual will find anything funny, even the prospect of lost keys after midnight. I’m afraid, partly, of people becoming different from who they are (I once paled at a girlfriend’s fake lenses). I don’t believe that drinking reveals our true face, but it pares that face down to its essential, which is to say universal, features. It flattens us. Suddenly, any joke, any lips, any song, any cheeseburger will do, in any order. And the other side too: a stone in your shoe hurts no worse than heartbreak.
The only good sip of beer is the first one. Every next sip merely chases that pleasure, while making us more and more certain that we can catch it.
We know a couple that does “club nights” at home—they get drunk, take drugs, stay up all night, listen to music, just the two of them. I confess that I find this degenerate, proof of a fatal lack of self-control, and yet from a different angle I can see it as sweet, downright enviable, because even this activity that’s designed mainly to make strangers tolerable they’re excited to do with each other, just the two of them.
The man who doesn’t drink is suspicious (the trick I learned traveling in Georgia was to take the first shot of chacha with ostentatious stoicism, so that no one suspected me of pouring the subsequent ones in my lap). The man who drinks and shits himself is proving his comity through a ritualized display of weakness (what Colette’s teetotaling friend sought among the drinkers and opium-eaters was their trust). The man who drinks and never gets drunk becomes CEO of the Vietnamese bank where I worked. If we take this seriously, drinking is being read as a metaphor for ‘hard times,’ the CEO by his natural gifts being the one capable of leading us through them. Which means I’m being too literal, when I test myself by not drinking in situations when I’m excepted to.
He laughed at the Lonely Planet’s suggestion to avoid invitations to drink in Russia by saying you’re an alcoholic. “They’ll just say, ‘Yeah, exactly!’”
The last time I woke up in a pool of my own, I remembered having pushed and grappled a friend who would not kiss me, right before I kicked in some dorm room mosquito net. I went to apologize, and I never got so drunk again. The pleasures born of intoxication are like the nightlit lines of a modernist corporate foyer, and in the end they pale (they have to, they just have to) compared to the prickly walking-barefoot-through-the-forest of scenes like this: a decade later, her and I were hanging out right after the Weinstein news broke, and she remarked with some surprise that she’d never been sexually assaulted. Dolefully, worried she might think I was disappointed that she had forgotten, I said, “Well, I did sort of sexually assault you.” And she said, “Oh yeah, you did!”
A person will much more readily adopt their partner’s drinking habits than their bedtimes, fashions, or friends. Like any crime, drinking loves accomplices. The irreversible opening of a bottle is like an adulterous kiss, with all its false promises of just-this-once. Drinking is an infidelity against the self. Oh stray off the pulpit, Bartkus! It’s bad enough that you secretly imagine yourself as a Cossack in a cassock, let alone that you can’t admit that you’re really just an actuary!
“Why don’t you want to be among the drunk people,” she asked. And I said, “I can only explain while drunk.” But that’s not when people are interested in asking the question.